The thousands of RedBox DVD rental kiosks are very, very obviously never getting picked up by their very bankrupt owner, so tinkerers are buying ‘em up from the places that are still hosting one of the dead machines and, naturally, getting them to play Doom and trying to crack the OS so they can be reused for some cockamamie project. As of August, Walgreens alone claimed it was hosting 5,400 abandoned kiosks in its stores that cost $184,000 a month to remain powered up, and they’re not alone in trying to get the movie-vending albatrosses off their hands. Discords of hackers are being spun up, people are finding transaction records stuck in the units — one had 2,471 records going back to 2015 — and gradually the reverse engineers are figuring out the myriad error codes. Some are planning a clever way to organize their own DVDs, or how to DIY a Redbox device of their own.
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